ABC's Election Analyst blogs on the wonderful world of Australian Elections.

September 08, 2012

The Race for Sydney Lord Mayor

For seven decades newly elected NSW governments have treated Sydney City Council as a bauble of office, changing the rules to ensure their preferred candidate becomes Mayor.

In the 1940s the McKell government engaged in a series of council amalgamations that combined Sydney with eight surrounding Labor councils to ensure Labor elected a Lord Mayor.

After the 1965 election the Askin government split Sydney City Council in two, creating ultra-safe South Sydney Council council from the Labor parts of the council, and also removing other then Labor voting areas such as Paddington, Glebe and Newtown into neighbouring councils. Civic Reform dominated Sydney City through the 1970s, helped by the introduction of voluntary voting.

The Wran government brought back compulsory voting, limited the non-resident vote and re-amalgamated Sydney and South Sydney councils. When it looked that either Frank Sartor or Clover Moore would become Independent Mayor, the Unsworth government sacked the Council and the new Greiner government split the council again, creating a much smaller Sydney City covering just the CBD and Pyrmont.

The Carr government was happy to simply tweek the rules and have Frank Sartor become Independent Mayor ahead of the Olympics. But old habits re-emerged before the 2004 local government elections when Labor again amalgamated Sydney and South Sydney in the hope that former Keating government minister Michael Lee would become Labor Lord Mayor.

Instead Clover Moore was finally elected Lord Mayor. She was easily re-elected in 2008, and now more than three decades after she first took on the Labor machine on South Sydney Council and won, Moore looks set to win a third term as Lord Mayor and defy her critics.

One time bomb the O'Farrell government has introduced is a law that has forced Moore to choose between Sydney Town Hall and state Parliament. If Moore wins today she will have to resign as state member for Sydney, having served in state Parliament since 1988, the longest serving female MP in the state's history. Of the 27 state MPs who have been forced to make the choice, Moore is the only one to opt for local government.

Through her long involvement in inner city community politics, Moore has an enormous profile. She is a formidible force through stint of decades of hard work.

To give you a hint of Moore's support throughout the council area, the table below shows the percentage vote for each candidate by polling place in 2008. Moore led the count in all 35 polling places, polling more than 50% of the first preference vote in 32 of the 35.

It will be tough for any candidate to overcome this support for Moore. Even if forced to preferences, it would take a very tight exchange of preferences between other candidates to defeat Moore. With optional preferential voting in use, tight preferences are unlikely.

Comments

It should be noted that this state or local reg isn't just a NSW thing. Queensland Labor introduced it to force the then Mayor of Toowoomba to choose between local government and a state seat.

COMMENT: I pointed out in the first sentence that the law was bringing NSW into line with other states. The NSW law differs from Queensland in not forcing councillors to resign if they contest state elections.

Can you explain the maths of quotas? For example, for Kogorah, East Ward, 3 councillors to elect, the quotas listed add up to 4; and in Inverell, 9 councillors to elect, the quotas listed add up to 10. Always one more than the number of councillors to be elected.

COMMENT: The quota is worked out by dividing the total votes by the number of vacancies plus 1, then adding one to the quota. That means the total of quotas in percentage terms adds to one plus the number of vacancies as you note. However, in vote terms, the number of votes remaining with the overhang quota will always be short of the vote quota.

Having scrutinised votes at one of the larger polling booths in Sydney, I observed that both ALP and LPA voters seem to have been confused by their How to Vote cards: many of the "Other" Council votes are Liberal or Labour votes with a "1" above the line AND a "1" for their lead council candidate.

I believe this means the preferences are insufficient (the below the line trumps the above the line, and below the line need requires at least 5 ordinal preferences) and contributes to a very high "Other/Informal" rate of about 10%.

COMMENT: The below the line vote is used first, but if it is informal, then the vote reverts to the above the line marking. A lot of votes marked both ways have been included in the informal total but will come back into the count when votes are full verified at data entery.